Welcome to the social: Bing uses Facebook friends to power search

During a live event at Microsoft's headquarters today, Bing and Facebook announced that Facebook's social data is being added to Bing. In an optional Facebook module, Bing now shows what has been "Liked" by your friends and offers Facebook-powered people search results on Bing's search results page. These new social search features, available only when an individual is logged into Facebook while searching on Bing, will begin rolling out to users today, with full availability in the coming months.

New Features

When you search on Bing, you'll see relevant links and results that have been "Liked" by your Facebook friends. This is built on Facebook's public Like platform, and it allows Bing to take advantage of your social network to give you personalized search results.

Bing can also surface people's information based on their relevance to the searcher's Facebook network and friends. Names will be ranked higher if a person shares mutual friends and/or networks with them. Microsoft says four percent of all queries are people search (a billion queries per month) and the satisfaction rate for these results is really low.

The video below explains social search but could do better at showing the features in more detail:

Bing adds more Facebook

As always with Facebook, potential privacy issues came up. Microsoft is trying to avoid them with a Facebook popup that will come up only if you are logged into Facebook or have an active Facebook cookie. The popup notifies you that Facebook can improve your experience on Bing and offers two options: Learn More or No Thanks. It will show up the first five times you visit Bing, and the Facebook modules will not be present during any of your searches. If you ignore it all five times, the feature is turned on. You can turn it off by removing Bing in your Facebook account details. If you are not logged into Facebook at all, Bing won't make any indication that it offers Facebook personalization.

Welcome to the social

When first starting out on social search, Microsoft wondered whether a query could give better results if one's Facebook contacts were part of the experience. Apparently there were enough queries where the answer was yes.

Less than a month ago, a rumor suggested that Bing would gain access to all the data generated by Facebook users (in an anonymized form) to better personalize its search results, allowing Microsoft to use the information from Facebook's Like buttons. Today, the two companies briefly confirmed that something along these lines is coming.

The Microsoft-Facebook partnership has been a rollercoasterrideso far, starting with a $240 million investment from Microsoft in 2006 (when Facebook had just 7 million users). We've since seen Live Search powering Facebook, Microsoft winning and then losing ad platform exclusivity for the social networking site, and finally Bing search result integration. With today's news, it appears the roller coast cart is climbing back up another hill, and Microsoft emphasized that this is going to be a long ride.

Mirroring the offline world, people are relying on friends for input and advice more and more online. Since search is where people go to find answers and complete tasks, Microsoft argues that "social" makes sense for search. Today's announcement isn't huge in itself, but it does show promise, and it certainly gives Bing something that Google can't quickly replicate.